Linux.FR has an interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."

It's apparent from the voting that your opinion is more popular here, but I really don't think it's ridiculous to criticize pulseaudio (and the distros loading it) when the result was many broken systems.

Personally I am obviously still a devoted Linux user, but these things should not happen with a professional OS. Even if the changes were ultimately beneficial, the chaotic process through which pulse audio was released is unfortunately a set back to the credibility of a reliable OS. It is exactly this sort of mismanagement that fuels the cry that linux is not ready for the desktop.